Recreating the lost Well Hall House with Edith Nesbit

Well Hall House from Well Hall Road, 1909

Well Hall House has passed out of living memory.

It was built in 1733, was home to some Eltham notables and was demolished in 1930.

It stood between Well Hall Road and the moat and replaced the Tudor manor house which Sir Gregory Page knocked down to build his fine 18th century house.

But a building which dominated Well Hall, and was known by many seems to have left little trace.  There are a few photographs a handful of maps and the land records of the tithe schedule.

Well Hall, 1874

Together these show a tall building which ran to three floors, had a wing on each side and was set in an estate of about 33 acres including a front garden, a walled garden to the south, the moat , three ponds, a stream and much meadow and pasture land along with the farm buildings which included the present Tudor Barn.

A little to the north were Well Hall Cottages which in the 1840s had been a complex of six properties but by 1911 seem to have become a farm house and one cottage.

But Well Hall house was sufficiently enclosed that I doubt the cottages proved much of an intrusion, and so within its grounds the occupants of the big house got on with their favoured lives wandering the fourteen rooms and looking out east across the fields and west across their gardens.

Judging by the photographs I am not sure it was a place that would have caught my fancy.  It was tall and the design fitted that classical style of balance so that what you saw on one side was replicated on the other.

All of which is not much for a house which stood for just under two hundred years, but as these things work there is one other source of information, and that comes from Edith Nesbit, the novelist who lived in the house from the late 19th century into the twentieth.

Contained in some of her books are references to Eltham, Well Hall and the house itself.  And of these it is The Red House written in 1902 which provides some wonderful insights into the place.

The back of Well Hall House from the Paddock and moat, 1909

The book itself is a light account of the lives of a newly married couple who inherit the Red House and choose to live there.

In the course of the year that follows Ms Nesbit describes in some detail the house, its gardens, the nearby cottages with references to the village the parish church and offers up walk on parts for both Woolwich and Blackheath.

But it is the house which draws you in, with its panelled rooms, great hall, vaulted cellars and kitchen still with the equipment which would have been in use through the 18th and 19th centuries.

Added to this there are observations about the rooms which had been much messed about by changing fashion.

The front of Well Hall House, date unknown

Now like all such descriptions I suspect there will be points when the Red House departs from the actuality of the original, but I am confident that there is more that will have been the same than less.

This in turn stretched to her descriptions of the gardens, including the walled one, the presence of the railway with its station and embankment and the parish church.

Edith and her husband Hubert had taken on the house and 7 acres of the land.

Of course there may be more sources of information sitting in the Greenwich Heritage Centre and in the letters of the people who visited Edith and her husband at Well Hall which included the Webb’s, H.G.Wells and Bernard Shaw but in the meantime the Red House seems to have done the old place proud.

Location; Well Hall, London


Pictures; Well Hall House circa 1909,  from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Rob Ayers, http://gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm and Well Hall House, from The Edith Nesbit Society, http://www.edithnesbit.co.uk/ map of Well Hall from the OS Map of Kent 1858-74

Wilbraham Road just 30 years ago

Now just occasionally I like to revisit an old photograph I have used before.

This one comes courtesy of Tom McGrath and is from a series he took in the mid 1980s.

30 years later he went back and repeated the shot.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy


Pictures; by kind permission of Tom McGrath

Adventures in Middle England ……… from Leicestershire into the Cotswolds … No. 4 ..... fields … the empty road …. and no one to talk to

 I had forgotten just how quiet and empty bits of Britain can be

It’s an obvious observation but when you live in a city which is at the heart of an urban region it is possible to traverse a heap of other neighbouring cities and towns along with their suburbs without encountering a field, a farm or flocks of sheep and the odd herd of cattle.

True if you take to the motorways, you do get glimpses of fields, which may host a tractor, a rusty piece of farm equipment and some livestock, but the speed of travel means they are gone in a glance.

Not so if you choose to travel by country lanes, advised of course by Sidney Sat Nav and accompanied by Vera the Voice whose pronunciation of places can at times be eccentric.

The lanes and small roads my twist and become incredibly narrow while the occasional lumbering tractor creates a backlog of snaking traffic but it’s worth it.

Worth it because setting aside the tractor, there can be so many surprises from the wealth of wildflowers that grow beside the road, to the tunnels of trees which envelope you and the variety of cottages which just hove into view.

And to these can be added the sleepy villages, some more picturesque than others, which may still boast a pub but will almost certainly have a church with or without medieval bits and which if you are very lucky may be open to casual visitors.

Nearly 60 years ago on an ill-advised holiday when six of us booked a four berth caravan in Dorset  I remember the day we had gone our separate ways for the afternoon and I came across a small church in the middle of nowhere.

The door was unlocked, and I was the only occupant.  

The sunlight shone through the stained-glass windows illuminating specks of dust and casting shadows across the pulpit, font and stone tomb of a long dead squire and his wife.

But it was the mix of silence save for the ticking clock in the tower and the coolness of the interior which struck me after the fierce heat of the summer sun and the incessant buzz of insects which had accompanied me to the church door.

It was an experience only bettered when aged nine I was allowed to wander off from my grandparent’s house in a village outside Derby and explore the empty lanes, where nothing stirred in the heat of the day apart from the flitting butterflies and that hum from the telegraph wires.

For a boy from southeast London, it was magical if a little unnerving given that I never came across a soul, and only had those finger posts at crossroads as a point of reference.

Still, I never got lost, and the worst that happened was a bit of sun burn and a scolding for being late for tea.

Location; across Leicestershire into the Cotswold

Pictures; journeys in a rural background, 2024, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Deansgate remembered ................ stories from the Fox Inn on Byrom Street nu 1 .... a beginning

For many Deansgate is just a road which takes you from Knott Mill down to St Mary’s Gate.

The Fox Inn, Byrom Street, circa 1914

If you are lucky and the traffic flow is kind you can do the route in minutes.

If like me you prefer to walk it offers up a shed load of interesting buildings from the old public library between Liverpool Road and Tonman Street past the John Rylands and down to the Burlington Arcade.

And if you turn off and stroll down Liverpool Road towards the Duke’s Canal and Castlefield you will be rewarded with a rich lump of history.

Here was our Roman fort and and small town, the Manchester end of the Bridgewater Navigation, as well as the site of the first passenger railway station in the world and heaps more including one of the first recorded Cholera cases back in the 1830s.

Johhny Lee, young Charlie and Joe Gibbons

And it was a place teeming with people making it in the words of the historian Frank Heaton a “Manchester Village.”  It runs down from Deansgate towards the river, bounded on one side by a set of railway viaducts and on the other by Quay Street.

I first became fascinated by it almost four decades ago and keep getting drawn back.

And in those forty years I have researched and written about the area, walked its streets in the company of friends and conducted guided tours of its history.**

So with all of that behind me I was very pleased when Debs got in touch and supplied this picture of the pub her grandmother was born in on August 26 1908.

William Henry Forth, Doris and Florence Forth and Betty Marr

Doris Brack nee Forth grew up in the Fox Inn on Byrom Street and she recorded her memories of the pub and the area in a series of interviews with Mr Heaton who included some of them in his book.

They are a vivid picture of a vibrant working class area in the years after the Great War.

So over the next few weeks with the help of her granddaughter Debs I will be exploring those tapes and piecing together the story of a community.***

It starts with the Fox Inn and this wonderful picture. I know that standing i the doorway beside her father William Henry Forth are Doris and her sister Florence and their friend Betty Marr and Johhny Lee, her cousin Charlie and Joe Gibbons.

Now that’s a good start.

Location Byrom Street, Deansgate, Manchester

Picture; The Fox Inn, circa 1914, courtesy of Debs Brack

*The Manchester Village Deansgate Remembered, Frank Heaton, 1995, Neil Richardson

**Castlefield, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Castlefield

***Deansgate, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Deansgate

On a warm sunny afternoon on Barlow Moor Road, sometime before 1939

I like the way that old postcards can reveal our past in many different ways.

It’s every much as good as a detective story.

You start with the picture, move on to the postmark and the message and if you are very lucky may learn something from the manufacturer.

So here we are on Barlow Moor Road, sometime before May 1939, and judging from the trees perhaps on a sunny afternoon during the summer of the year before.  The trouble with these postcards is that the image may date back even earlier and will have been reissued over the years.

This one was taken by Harold Clarke of 83 Clarence Road Chorlton, and may have been part of a series issued by Lilywhite Ltd, of Brighouse, in Yorkshire.

There are 21 of his photographs in the Greater Manchester County Records collection dating from 1926 through to 1934 and some from 1926 carry a serial number close to the one in the picture.

Any way enough of the clever stuff and back to Barlow Moor Road on that sunny summer afternoon.  There is as ever a remarkable lack of traffic, with just a few cyclists a stationary hand cart, a couple of trams and what might be either a lorry or a coach away in the distance.

It looks to be afternoon judging from the shadows and the presence of the two school girls and it is scene which has pretty much vanished.

True the right hand side of the road looks familiar enough but the corresponding wall, railings and trees on the other side have long gone.

But having said that they were only demolished some thirty years ago when the road was widened and eventually the slip road onto the Parkway was constructed.

I will remember standing here waiting for a bus into town.  In the summer with the trees and the open land beyond that stone wall this was a pretty pleasant place to wait.

Nor am I alone in thinking so, because Lily writing on the back commented on how they had all enjoyed walking “under the shade of these trees.”

She lived on Withington Road and posted the card with its “Loving birthday greetings” on May 2nd, catching the 6.o’clock collection confident that it would arrive at 39 St Luke Street, Barrow in Furness for the following morning.

And it is still there today.

As is 83 Clarence Road, Chorlton where Harold A Clarke lived.

Although in the case of Clarence Road it is now Claridge which is the one that runs from Manchester Road over Oswald Road and into Peveril Crescent thereby offering up one last intriguing fact.

For here is another of our lost roads, or more accurately one of our renamed roads.

In 1911 there were three Clarence Roads.  There was our own as well as one in Longsight and another in Withington.

So not bad for one postcard.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection, date unknown

A postcard with a difference, the Cathedral from 1902

I like this postcard of the Cathedral.

It combines a picture of the building along with the coat of arms of the city and an equally attractive image of a ship on the Ship Canal.

And there is a history to it for this will have been one of the last picture post cards to have the message on the front.

Until 1899 picture postcards could only have a small picture and short message on one side with just the address and stamp on the other.  But the regulations were relaxed in 1899 so that companies could produce a larger card with an image on one side and space for the message and address on the reverse.

This was in some part due to the postcard company of Raphael Tuck and Son who spent four years  negotiating with the Post Master General for the change.

The business began with the sale of pictures and frames in 1866 and went to become as a distributor of graphic art printing.

Their first regular series of postcards was issued in 1899, and this may date from soon afterwards.

Now I say that because within a few months of the change in the regulations Tuck had begun to issue the new style of cards.

But ours has the post mark of 1902 which I guess suggests that there were still plenty of the old stock around.

Nor is that all, for the message itself says much about how these early postcards were used.

Betty who sent the card is not interested in any great events, or in communicating holiday news but simply a request to borrow a cwt of coal if “Mr Mr P has not put in the coals.”

And is a reminder that in age before the telephone the post card was the quickest way of getiing in touch.

Picture, Manchester Cathedral, from the series Manchester, a set of three, produced by Tuck & Sons Ltd, courtesy of Tuck DB, http://tuckdb.org/

The walk in the park........ no. 18 ...... from the Goldsmith Collection

Our Jillian often gets her best pictures first thing in the morning when the light is sharp, the air is fresh and there is a promise of another exciting day.

Location; Greenwich Park


Picture; A walk in the park,, 2017 from the collection of Jillian Goldsmith